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idia Yuknavitch’s debut memoir, The Chronology of Water, seeped into the culture after its 2011 publication. It rooted slowly but firmly, like all “cult classics.” It wasn’t so much the story of her abusive childhood and the liberation she found in sex and substances, swimming, and writing as it was a polemic against the notion of a fixed past. Its emphatic embrace of subjective experience—celebrating a certain ownership and reframing of your own history—over static, objective fact made it a kind of guide. Words to live by. The book has been described as something you don’t so much read as “become converted to.”

The most famous convert might be Kristen Stewart, who’s been working to adapt the book as a movie for nearly a decade. The actor has had an impressive run since her Twilight days, with celebrated performances in indies, like Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, and more artistically inclined mainstream films, playing Princess Di in Pablo Larraín’s 2021 Spencer. But for her first turn behind the camera, Stewart has said she was waiting for a “starting gun,” one she found in Yuknavitch’s work. Reportedly, 40 pages into her first read of The Chronology of Water, Stewart put the book down and started trying to get in touch with its author. 

For all that it is, Yuknavitch’s memoir is not an obvious pick for adaptation. Unlike another landmark Oregon author’s memoir, there is no Pacific Crest Trail guiding its narrative. Instead, the book is remarkable for the way it captures embodied consciousness, the beautiful, incongruous mess of being alive—though it’s probably just a regular mess in the eyes of most Hollywood execs. Still, when news broke in 2018 of Stewart’s plans to turn it into a movie, it was hard not to be excited. And the excitement has only built as she’s dug in her heels, fighting the movie machine and even wagering her career to make it happen: At one point, she threatened to quit the business if she couldn’t find support for the film. 

Now, her project is seeing the light of day, with Imogen Poots starring as Lidia and Jim Belushi as Ken Kesey, the notorious author and Merry Prankster who becomes an unlikely mentor. After premiering at Cannes in the spring of 2025, it’s slated for wide theatrical release in January.

Reproducing the book faithfully onscreen, in a word-for-word sense, would make something closer to video art than a feature film. But the movie does follow the outline of Yuknavitch’s coming of age. She left her sexually abusive father’s home in San Francisco, betraying his wishes and taking a swimming scholarship at Texas Tech University, though not before picking up her mother’s drinking habit. Swimming was her escape, but that world brought its own abusers, and she found another freedom in a spiral of sex and drugs that eventually landed her in Eugene, in Kesey’s orbit at the University of Oregon.

Yuknavitch had meetings with Stewart early in the process, but she’s always regarded the film, positively, as Stewart’s project. “She’s making a piece of art that may have had a launching pad or a touchstone in a piece of art I made,” Yuknavitch told Portland Monthly last spring. “That’s how it feels to me: far away, even though it’s intimately connected to me.”

Yuknavitch’s husband, filmmaker Andy Mingo, was more active in the adaptation. He had prepared a screenplay for The Chronology of Water before Stewart reached out and collaborated with her on an initial draft, though the final script solely credits Stewart. “This is pretty meta,” Mingo says. He’s portrayed in both the book and film, and compares the disorienting layers of book, screenplay, and movie to something like Being John Malkovich. Jokes aside, he says he was “sobbing” and “shaking” while watching the final cut at Cannes.

Watching it is like being taken right into the core of the memoir—submerging in pure feeling and reflection. Just as Yuknavitch takes her reader through the agony of her first child’s stillbirth with unflinching compassion, Stewart frames fragmented moments of torment with a raw humanity, unshy of rendering blood and bodily fluids onscreen.

Stewart’s movie also pays homage to the book’s unconventional storytelling. Most notable is an almost complete lack of establishing shots. Instead, it relies on extreme close-ups to set the emotional rather than physical scene, going in like Yuknavitch does with her prose. Similarly fearless is Poots; the 28 Weeks Later star gives her best performance to date. She holds the camera’s gaze, her expression filling the screen as she articulates the high-stress moments of a swim meet or the overwhelming relief when years of pressure finally lift in Kesey’s workshop.

The movie carries the book’s frayed edges, too, never grabbing for easy catharsis, never spelling things out. Instead of narrative, it’s driven by a desire for an honest confrontation with trauma. Both the book and movie are about sorting through the material of one’s own experience, which never comes in a straight line, and claiming agency in the process.

Instead of relying on traditional visual storytelling, much of Stewart’s adaptation focuses on the tumult of Lidia’s inner life, using abstracted shots to evoke a feeling, as opposed to regurgitated memory. Through repeated glimpses of her childhood home in San Francisco, we come to understand the abuse she faced there, with rapid-fire cuts jamming those flashbacks against the present. It is a stylish movie with a distinct visual language, but it never veers into exploitation. This is no aesthetic spectacle fetishizing Yuknavitch’s suffering.

On the contrary, like the book, it grapples with the complicated ways abuse affects desire, the ways chaos and tranquility inform each other—the violence of diving into water only to meet the serenity under the surface. Stewart manages to apply that same juxtaposition to Lidia’s escapes into sex and substances and writing—wherever she finds salvation. “How many miles does it take to swim to the self?” Poots says at one point.

“There are just certain voices that help you find yours,” Stewart told Vulture recently. She described her project as not so much about Yuknavitch as it is about how we “excavate, recreate, reframe things in order to survive.” It’s clear that retelling the Oregon author’s story became a way of digesting the book’s larger theme: making her own story from Yuknavitch’s material as a way of reorienting and reframing the past, taking possession of it.

“Disappear into your imagination,” a freewheeling Belushi bellows, counterculture embodied in his portrayal of Kesey. Lidia takes his advice, sharing a fragmented lyric essay of clipped vignettes at her first public reading. In that moment, she is in control, narrating for the first time instead of receiving life’s events. You can’t erase the past, this story argues, but you can reshape it.